FBI may reopen cold cases
By CHRIS TALBOTT, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 57 minutes ago
JACKSON, Miss. - The
FBI is considering reopening dozens of cold cases involving slayings suspected of being racially motivated in the South during the 1950s and '60s.
An announcement could come as early as Tuesday, according to a law enforcement official who spoke with the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the plans have not yet been finalized.
In addition to the FBI's own investigations, the Southern Poverty Law Center submitted its own list last week of 74 potential unsolved slayings that involved white-on-black violence.
Thirty-two of the deaths happened in Mississippi. The others were in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky and New York.
Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, said each case was researched in the late 1980s when the group was putting together a civil rights memorial. But it is unclear if each could be considered a civil rights case, he said.
"The truth is we don't know," said Potok, whose group investigates hate crimes. "In each case there was some evidence to suggest that these were racial murders, but it absolutely was not proven. Had we been able to nail them down, their names would've been literally chiseled into the civil rights memorial that sits outside our building here."
U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton in Jackson reviewed the list of Mississippi killings for the Associated Press on Friday and said based on the limited amount of information available that none would qualify for federal prosecution under civil rights statutes. But he said many could still be prosecuted on a local or state level as murders.
The deaths outlined by the center happened in a variety of ways, from police-involved shootings to trysts with white women broken up by gunfire.
In most cases, the statute of limitations under federal civil rights laws will have run out, Lampton said. In others, charges could not be brought because the accused already have faced charges and been cleared by a jury.
Last month, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau was aggressively seeking to solve cold civil rights cases, vowing to "pursue justice to the end, and we will, no matter how long it takes, until every living suspect is called to answer for their crimes."
Most recently federal prosecutors brought kidnapping and conspiracy charges against James Ford Seale, 71, who allegedly participated in the 1964 kidnappings and murders of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in southwest Mississippi.
Seale was arrested Jan. 24 after the U.S. Justice Department reopened its investigation and learned that he was still alive. He has pleaded not guilty and is due for trial in April. The case qualified for federal prosecution because the captors allegedly took Moore and Dee across the state line into Louisiana while they were still alive.
In 1994, Mississippi won the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of NAACP leader Medgar Evers.
In Alabama, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. In 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted.
Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted last June of manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.
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Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.